{"id":14930,"date":"2024-02-01T00:46:57","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T00:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/01\/russia-and-ukraine-complete-major-prisoner-exchange-after-mysterious-plane-crash\/"},"modified":"2024-02-01T00:46:57","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T00:46:57","slug":"russia-and-ukraine-complete-major-prisoner-exchange-after-mysterious-plane-crash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/2024\/02\/01\/russia-and-ukraine-complete-major-prisoner-exchange-after-mysterious-plane-crash\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia and Ukraine complete \u2018major\u2019 prisoner exchange after mysterious plane crash"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war, in the first such swap since the deadly crash of a Russian military plane that Moscow claimed was carrying 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers. <\/p>\n

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 207 Ukrainian service members were returned on Wednesday, while the Russian Defense Ministry said 195 Russian military personnel had been received. <\/p>\n

\u201cOurs are at home. 207 guys,\u201d Zelensky said, adding that almost half of those returned were \u201cdefenders of Mariupol,\u201d the southern Ukrainian city that was brutally besieged in the early weeks of the war. <\/p>\n

Zelensky said 50 prisoner swaps had now taken place since Russia launched its full-scale invasion nearly two years ago, through which Ukraine had brought 3035 soldiers home. \u201cWe will do everything to return each and every one of them. We have not forgotten about anyone. We are looking for every single name,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Wednesday\u2019s exchange was the first since the mysterious crash of a Russian IL-76 plane on January 24 in Russia\u2019s Belgorod region, which neighbors eastern Ukraine. <\/p>\n

Moscow claimed the plane was transporting dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war, while Kyiv said it was carrying Russian missiles to be used in further strikes on Ukraine. <\/p>\n

Russia initially failed to produce visual evidence to back up its claims that soldiers had perished in the crash. Ukraine later said it had intelligence suggesting only five bodies were delivered from the crash site to a morgue in Belgorod, which Yusov said matched the number of crew members on the plane. A number of Ukrainian officials accused Russia of falsely suggesting that Ukraine had inadvertently killed dozens of its own soldiers. <\/p>\n

Kyiv officials said last Friday that the names of the 65 POWs in Russia\u2019s list tallied with the list of POWs scheduled to be returned to Ukraine as part of the exchange planned on the day of the crash. But Ukraine\u2019s intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said there was still no reliable information as to who might have been on board the downed Russian plane. <\/p>\n

Speaking after Wednesday\u2019s prisoner exchange, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed the IL-76 plane had been downed by a US Patriot missile system. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe plane was shot down \u2013 this has already been established with certainty \u2013 by the American Patriot system. This has already been established through examination,\u201d Putin said in a meeting focused on his election campaign. He called on international authorities to conduct their own investigations. <\/p>\n

Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the downing of the plane. While the Il-76 plane would have been within the range of a Patriot deployed close to Ukraine\u2019s northern border, Ukraine has consistently said it will not use Western-donated missiles beyond its own internationally-recognized territory. <\/p>\n

Putin stressed that Russia would not halt prisoner exchanges despite the plane crash. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to pick up our guys,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have thousands, they [Ukrainians] have several dozen, maybe hundreds [of POWs]. But we will still take our guys if the Ukrainian side is ready for this, and they give a signal that they are ready.\u201d <\/p>\n

Neither Ukraine\u2019s nor Russia\u2019s statements on Wednesday\u2019s prisoner exchange mentioned the crash. <\/p>\n

The head of Zelensky\u2019s office, Andriy Yermak, said the swap was \u201cthe second major exchange after a long break.\u201d Alongside the defenders of Mariupol, he said the returned prisoners included \u201csoldiers who were at Azovstal, Zmiinyi Snake Island, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Kherson and Sumy directions.\u201d <\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry said the Russian soldiers released would be transported by military transport aircraft to Moscow for treatment and rehabilitation. <\/p>\n\n

This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war, in the first such swap since the deadly crash of a Russian military plane that Moscow claimed was carrying 65 captured Ukrainian soldiers. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 207 Ukrainian service members were returned on Wednesday, while the Russian Defense Ministry said 195 Russian military <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14931,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}